The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web related distribution of documents. The Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents and media through the Web. Also, as a result of the rapid expansion of the Web, E-mail, which has been distributed for over 25 years over smaller private and specific purpose networks, has moved into distribution over the Web because of the vast distribution channels that are available.
The availability of extensive E-mail distribution channels has made it possible to keep all necessary parties in business, government and public organizations completely informed of all transactions that they need to know about at almost nominal costs. Because of the ease of such communication, the numbers of frequent addressees communicated with by each sender of E-mail has greatly increased. Accordingly, most E-mail programs enable their users to use diminutive names such as nicknames or aliases to represent the address of a single addressee or a group of addressees, e.g. “Bob” used to represent “RobertQ.Lewis@WQXZ.com” or “GroupA” used to represent a group of three salesmen in the sender's organization who must receive any E-mail correspondence related to product changes. It is now common practice for almost every E-mail user to maintain an address book relating his list of aliases to the addresses of the addressees assigned such aliases. Address books are a primary target of the malevolent intruders who spread computer viruses. The address book is accessed and the virus is then sent to every address in the book.